NORTH OF REALITY TRANSLATION PROJECT: THE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL LABYRINTH

by johannespunkt

Godafton. That’s Swedish for “good evening.” How quaint. Welcome back to the North of Reality Translation Project. Tonight’s translated piece is called: The Roosevelt National Labyrinth. Translation notes are found below the story, and they are in English so that most people who are looking at this website can read them. All entries in the project are found at the following link: /tag/the-north-of-reality-translation-project/

I modelled the name of the Roosevelt National Labyrinth after the Swedish rendition of Yellowstone National Park, which seems like the most sensible way to translate it. It did not become a very shocking name in Swedish but I did have to take five minutes to remember any other name for a thing in the US which follows the formula of [name] National [area of land]. I found a lot of forests that no-one has translated into Swedish, though.

The difference between “capital punishment” and “death penalty” is mostly flavour, but it felt like important flavour. Capital punishment seems to me to be the category, whereas death penalty is more a specific instance of someone being sentenced to death, or the death penalty as it exists in some specific form in some state or legal system. The two are translated the same into Swedish, so I took the liberty of loosening the translation a bit for the second one, turning it into a verb to make it feel more immediate and personal: “dödsstraff” vs “dömd till döden.”

For “implied into reality” I had a lot of trouble – because we have no equivalent of “into reality” or “into existence” – and ended up inventing a metaphor based on “heavily” implying something with the full weight of the justice system.

The Swedish rapper Pst/Q once remarked in an interview that the punchline-heavy style that he rapped in at the beginning of his career was “not really Swedish” (I’m paraphrasing and translating from memory here, forgive any misrepresentations) and that people were often baffled by the barrage of wordplay present in his music. Now, basically anyone who talks to me knows wordplay is my thing in any language I’m speaking, but I feel a bit like that when trying to translate the culinary tastes of Uel’s fictional subjects – for example, how do I Scandify “refried jellybeans”?

Of course, you’re meant to feel weird about the food. Go on, feel weird about it.

Anyway, in what was news to me at least, it turns out that the re- in refried beans doesn’t mean again, it just means well. So I simply translated it literally, because there is no equivalent – we barely have these two kinds of beans in Sweden.

The last problem area here is what on earth to do with the phrase “When your eyes open again.” The easiest way to say it is to just say “När du öppnar dina ögon igen” (When you open your eyes again) or even “När du vaknar igen” (When you wake up again). But those alternatives miss the fact that there’s agency in the eyes here, not in the person. The way I read the story, the fact that it’s not the peson themselves doing the waking up is actually very important.

If one were to write that a door opens, for example, to circumscribe the problem here, the way to translate it into Swedish would be one of three options, each working fine on their own but in the context of eyes opening they all feel odd to me. I can write “dörren öppnas,” which is the passive voice and obscures the agent, or I can write “dörren öppnar sig,” making “open” a reflexive verb, or I can write “dörren öppna[s/r sig] av sig själv,” which foregrounds the autonomy of the door. Passive voice is out, because we want to focus on the agency here. Foregrounding the autonomy is also out, because it’s too heavy-laden. Our Goldilocks option seems to be “öppnar sig,” which is a phrasing I can only recall from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, where it’s used as a command and in second-person. And, actually, thinking of it like that, that’s not a bad phrasing, and certainly not a connotation Uel would object to.

~

Next week the translated piece is Choking Hazard, which, if you read it, seems untranslatable. Feel free to speculate wildly about how I will have solved this.